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AMD Pushes Out New R600/700 3D Code

04-18-2009, 09:40 AM

Phoronix: AMD Pushes Out New R600/700 3D Code

In late December AMD had published open-source R600/700 3D code that also allowed for 2D and X-Video acceleration, but was not of use to end-users interested in full OpenGL acceleration. AMD had then released the R600/700 3D documentation a month later and then the R700 ISA documentation just a few weeks back. Today, however, AMD is finally pushing some workable code into a public code repository.

Comment

More like 3-4 years for a new generation. We're already hooked into future GPU development work so the delay from intro to open source driver support should be shorter than for previous generations when we were mostly playing "catch-up".

One of the big changes with 6xx was at least partially separating the programming model from the hardware implementation, so big changesa in the hardware have relatively less impact on the driver than in previous generations. 6xx and 7xx are very different hardware implementations but the programming interface is pretty similar. The downside was that it took a lot of work to get drivers running on the new programming model in the first place, but we're mostly past that now.

The discussion about "separating" was for DRM and UVD, shouldn't have any impact on 3D. I obviously can't comment on status.